[Numpy-discussion] numpyx.pyx (recent svn) works?

[Stéfan van der Walt]

On 09/04/2008, Francesc Altet <faltet at carabos.com> wrote:
>  Well, I agree that Greg Ewing (the Pyrex creator) has possibly not been
>  very speedy in adding the suggested patches (Greg has his own thoughts
>  on what should be added to Pyrex and what not), which ultimately
>  brought to the need of the Cython fork, but let me stress out that he
>  has always been *very* responsive to the questions on the Pyrex list,
>  and quick enough in fixing real problems in Pyrex.  I'm personally very
>  satisfied with Pyrex as does its job extremely well.  And I'm specially
>  grateful to Greg for his *huge* contribution to make the job of doing
>  Python extensions a pretty simple job.

>  So, I don't really think that Pyrex should be considered a "worrying
>  tool" at all (even in the "long run"), rather the contrary, it is a
>  extremely useful tool.

Your first paragraph above served to convince me that this is indeed a
worrying tool.

a) The author is not quick (or willing?) to add patches
b) The author wants to decide what goes in and what not (contrary to
the community)

(Sounds a bit like g77 vs gfortran.)

Pyrex is therefore pretty much in maintenance mode.  Cython has added
some vast improvements; amongs other things

 - List comprehension
 - For i in range (instead of the hacked for i from ...)
 - Introspection of source into .pyx file

I do agree with you that Pyrex is very useful, but Cython does exactly
the same thing, and more, with the additional bonuses that it is being
actively developed, and that the SAGE guys like NumPy :)

Cheers
Stéfan